The Spy’s Daughter by Adam Brookes

I read Adam Brookes’s first book in this series Night Heron when it was released four years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed the main character journalist Phillip Mangan’s introduction into the skills of tradecraft. He is the anti-Bourne. He doesn’t kick or shoot his way out of trouble; he knows how to read people and as his superiors say, he’s “a natural!” The humanity has been stripped away from many of the characters in the spy novels I read, but Brookes has written a realistic character who has only gotten better as the series has gone on.

The Spy’s Daughter picks up where the second book Spy Games left off. Mangan is seemingly off the grid in Thailand, but the world of espionage continues to plot around him and he is quickly flushed out of hiding and back into the game. In the DC area, a high-level American intelligence officer with ties to China has died of an apparent suicide, a first-generation genius Chinese-American college student is eyed by the defense industry, and Mangan’s former handler Trish Patterson has been relocated to take some time off after her last assignment. The threads become intertwined and the reader is left trying to figure out how it will all work out.

I frequently recommend this series to friends who read spy novels. The Spy’s Daughter could definitely be read as a stand-alone, but starting the series at the beginning would be the way to go.

4 out of 5 stars

Thank you very much to NetGalley, Redhook Books, and the Mr. Brookes for providing the advanced copy for this review.